"In honor of the last
shuttle flight, we're going to have what we call an
'All-American Meal'. Originally, this was planned as a July 4th
meal when the flight was going to be going during July 4th," said
Vickie Kloeris, NASA food scientist and manager of the space food
systems lab at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

"Formulations are a little bit different than recipes because
usually formulations are designed to make many, many servings of
an item," Kloeris said. "Our processing is a little bit different
because we don't have refrigerators and freezers for food and so
our food needs to be made shelf-stable, meaning it can be at room
temperature for long periods of time."

"And so that's actually a little more challenging than just
cooking something to serve immediately at home because you have
to go through a more extensive process to make it shelf-stable,"
she said.

NASA has published the formulations for the meal's main course to
its website and invited the public to share in preparing their
own All-American Meal.

"We're offering an opportunity for the public to see some of what
the crew is going to be eating on-orbit, so they can eat like the
commander ... if they would like to," said Kloeris.

"Sandy Magnus, I believe, was the originator of the idea,"
Kloeris said. "When shuttles have gone and docked with [the]
station, they usually plan some kind of joint meal. And so Sandy,
being a member of the 135 crew, she was trying to think of a
joint meal to plan and because of July 4th, she came up with the
idea for a July 4th meal and that's where this originated."

This time, the crew's activities — unpacking the cargo module
they launched of a year's worth of supplies for the space station
and then repacking it with spent equipment and trash to return
home — will likely keep her too busy to augment the All-American
Meal with her own creations.

"I am probably not going to have the time to cook," Magnus said
in a pre-flight interview with collectSPACE.com. "I'll probably
just have time to do little stuff, like just mix prepared food
together to get different flavors."

"It took hours to do some of the cooking that I did," she added.
"If I find the time, perhaps, I'll do some... but I can't
promise."